Update 5/2/14: This link explains the introduction of temporary domains. It works this way–A couple marries and purchases a domain at .wed to celebrate their union. After the wedding, interest in that event will drop off a great deal, and its site will go “unused and unvisited.” However, to avoid that kind of stagnation, the owners of .wed have decided to jack up prices in the third year from less than a hundred dollars to tens of thousands of dollars effectively vacating that domain for new users to buy and own.

If you’re curious, the owner of .wed is this company, Atgron. Its CEO and the apparent progenitor of this new idea is Adrienne Mcadory, a former IT project manager at the Pentagon. She was interviewed in the NPR podcast we based our post on. You can listen to the podcast here.

Do you own a website? If so, the chances are high you’re using a domain address that ends in .com which makes sense as its the most widely used and easily recognized domain ending in use today. Although, due to ICANN’s expansion of new generic top level domain addresses or gTLDs there is a chance that could change. Planet Money’s new episode, “The Wild West of the Internet,” does a good job explaining the history of .com, and what the introduction of these new domain names means for its future and the future of the whole Internet.

ICANN, which stands for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is a non-profit organization based in Los Angeles, CA, and is responsible for introducing all of the new gTLDs that include such endings as .ninja, .kim, and .link. (Actually, here’s ICANN’s list of new domains.)

One of the benefits of new domains being introduced is that it opens up space for possible new domains and could lead to cleaner and shorter web addresses which helps out both businesses and consumers.

If you’re interested in buying one of these new domains, it’s not totally out of the question. But most of them will inevitably be owned by large corporations. If you are the owner of one of these domains, however, you can look forward to setting all of the rules for the way it will be used including the fee for the cost of using it.

Of course, as Planet Money points out, this isn’t the first time new domains have been introduced. ICANN introduced a handful of new domain names around the turn of the century that were bought up by businesses interested mostly in preventing their competitors from owning them and not necessarily expanding them into viable online locations.

What do you think about this latest development in web domain names? Good, bad, doesn’t matter? Let us know in the comments section! Have a nice week!